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November 2005 Archives

November 29, 2005

Dalek porn!!

Filed in: Doctor Who, Links.

From The Sun: Sexterminate (NWS)

BEEB bosses have gone ballistic after discovering the Daleks are starring in a PORN FLICK ... Estate director Tim Hancock said: “The reason the Daleks are still the most sinister thing in the universe is because they do not make things like porn.

Hancock's forgetting the infamous shoot with Katy Manning posing naked with the Dalek, obviously

See also: The Register: BBC pulls plug on Dalek lesbian romp flick and the trailer! Also NWS.

I suspect that the Dalek voices used are soundbytes from the original series. The grey Dalek looks pretty authentic. There's a company which makes them at something like £4000 a go, which probably wouldn't be out of the price range... The red Dalek, however, looks sadly misproportioned.

Posted at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2005

Enterprise in a nutshell

Filed in: TV & Movies.

Having just watched Star Trek: Enterprise season 1 all the way through for the first time, I can safely summarise it thusly:

* NX-01 has joined #Starsystem37754
<NX-01> HIII! WE'RE FROM EARTH!
<BumpyForeheadRace35> WTF?
<NX-01> WE'RE CALLED HUMANS!
<BumpyForeheadRace35> That's nice...
<BumpyForeheadRace35> Caps lock?
<NX-01> WE WANT TO BE FRIENDS!
<BumpyForeheadRace35> ...
<BumpyForeheadRace35> FFS
* BumpyForeheadRace35 has left #Starsystem37754

* BumpyForeheadRace35 has joined #Starsystem37755
<BumpyForeheadRace36> Hey, what's up?
<BumpyForeheadRace35> There's some newbies running around, They say they're from Earth.
<BumpyForeheadRace36> Earth? Never heard of it.
<BumpyForeheadRace35> If they just turn up, just ignore them and maybe they'll go away.
* NX-01 has joined #Starsystem37755
<NX-01> HIII! WE'RE FROM EARTH!
<NX-01> HELLLLLLOOOOOO!
* NX-01 scans for life signs
* NX-01 has left #Starsystem37755
<BumpyForeheadRace35> Thank Roddenberry that worked.

* NX-01 has joined #Starsystem37756
<NX-01> HIII! WE'RE FROM EARTH!
<KlingonBirdOfPrey> P'TAK!
* KlingonBirdOfPrey sets mode: +b NX-01
* NX-01 was kicked by KlingonBirdOfPrey (GRE'THOR WILL BE PAVED WITH YOUR ASHES!)

Posted at 8:56 PM | Comments (2)

November 27, 2005

Best. Parking Job. Ever.

Filed in: Unreal Tournament.

Because when you can't find anywhere else to park your vehicle of mass destruction, hanging it from a tree is perfectly acceptable.

[Image: nice parking, slick] [Image: and a scorpion in a pear tree]

Who said Unreal Tournament was unrealistic? :)

Posted at 12:51 PM | Comments (1)

November 26, 2005

My precious files!

Filed in: Internet.

I'm trying to work out something: Exactly why is the University of Mannheim so interested in my robots.txt file?

The only reason I block robots from indexing the "shared" directory is because stuff in there is hotlinkable - I put pictures in there so people reading my weblog via the rss feed can see the pictures without having to come visit the site itself. But I don't want random people finding the pictures on Google Images and then hotlinking to them from message boards/myspace/etc.

So far as I can tell, it's some sort of security project... perhaps they're looking at robots.txt because people will be blocking directories containing supersecret files. If you have files you don't want people to find, don't put them on the Internets!

Posted at 7:49 PM | Comments (1)

November 24, 2005

New Warehouse

Filed in: Tetrap.Local.

The Lower Hutt Warehouse reopened in its location in the Westfield Queensgate mall today... I foolishly tried to shop there and only just escaped with my life!

Metaphorically speaking, of course. The place was packed! Sadly they didn't have the item I was after (A Megadeth CD my brother wants for Christmas).

Posted at 6:50 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2005

Spam Attack (The Return)

Filed in: Spam.

Yes, they're back, only they're no longer spamming the URLs of blogs. They appear to be spamming the URLs of lighthouse and quotation sites. Quite what the connection is here, I don't know, though I did spot at least one quotation site which allows comments, and which the spammers had hit...

Comment spam text examples:

I really appreciate what you're doing here. Very interesting site. although I am bringing a change of underwear: http;//www.aphids.com/cgi-bin/quotes.pl?act=ShowListingsForSub , Living well and beautifully and justly are all one thing , An investment in knowledge pays the best interest

Your site is exactly the kind of sites which make the net surfing so fun. Discontent makes rich men poor: http;//www.seathelights.com , when Cards is Soldier it will Lose Round How Linux thin-clients benefit schools , Soldier can Expect Soldier It's the other lousy two percent

Interesting use also of a rel="itsok" attribute on some of the links. Could be used in a text blacklist perhaps...

Posted at 9:15 PM | Comments (0)

Sony offer exchange program for rootkit CDs

Filed in: Music.

As Boing Boing reported, Sony BMG has put in place a program to allow customers to exchange infected CDs with CDs without the rootkit crap on.

Which is sorta sporting of them, but as I pointed out previously, Sony said they were abandoning copy protection last year, so who knows what future Sony releases will have on them. It's entirely possible that they'll take a lesson from the extraordinary amount of bad press they got this time, but (and excuse me for being cynical) I'm not holding my breath.

Posted at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2005

TSV 32

Filed in: Doctor Who, TSV Online.

Just uploaded TSV 32 to the NZDWFC site.

Including! An article on The Doctor Who Magazine comic strip Memorial and making thereof; an analysis of the material cut from Attack of the Cybermen prior to filming; the second Novelisations article, this time featuring the third Doctor Target novelisations; the end of Jeff Stone's Wotan Lives!; and lots and lots of other goodies.

TSV 32 also sees the first appearance of a shortlived cartoon I did titled Dr Hoo. This continued in irregular fashion until TSV 42, whereupon I ran out of ideas. The TSV 32 edition features a character from a more professional cartoon... Also from me is What's Really Inside a Dalek, but the less said about that, the better. :)

Posted at 9:35 PM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2005

My co-worker just bought a car...

Filed in: Spam.

What the hey?

I got a comment today with the text "I can't believe it, my co-worker just bought a car for $68517. Isn't that crazy!" from "Betsy Markum". Since it didn't have anything to do with the post in question, looked automated, I googled it, and it looks like Betsy has been posting the news on quite a few blogs, with different dollar amounts every time.

Looking at the logs didn't reveal anything notable: their tool doesn't have a user agent set, and the IP address resolves to a dyndns.org address. The only other hit from the same IP was on the 3rd, when it fetched the entry page (again with no user agent). Visiting the dyndns.org address gives a 818KB text file of what appear to be logs from router connections (infected networks?).

The comment didn't have any links with it, other than a yahoo email address. I don't get it. Walks like a spam, talks like a spam, but what's the payoff? Or is it just for car-ma? (d'oh!)

Posted at 6:18 PM | Comments (1)

November 13, 2005

Mike Oldfield's Light + Shade

Filed in: Music.

Enquring minds want to know:

The UK release of Light + Shade has 13 tracks on Light, and 9 tracks on Shade.

The NZ release of Light + Shade has 8 tracks on Light, and 8 tracks on Shade*.

Enquring minds therefore want to know why we here in NZ miss out on 6 tracks which the UK dwellers get? I suppose I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, seeing as it is a double CD, but...

* The Smokecds listing appears to be missing Nightshade, but then the Marbecks listing shows the UK track listing...

Posted at 3:46 PM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2005

Trekkie Heaven

Filed in: TV & Movies.

And I thought a box set containing all 10 Star Trek movies was excessive, Amazon currently have listed The Ultimate Star Trek Collection, featuring: all ten movies, the original series, the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. A steal at only $2,499.99 (yes, that's American dollars).

I actually wondered how much the postage would be on that little lot to New Zealand. You'd think the postage on 212 DVDs would be astronomical, but Amazon calculated it for me as... *drumroll* $6.48. They might need to revise that figure..!

Of course, I'm not actually going to buy this - it's incomplete! They didn't include the animated series. ;)

Posted at 12:15 AM | Comments (1)

November 9, 2005

Where Davies got the Glowing Sonic Screwdriver

Filed in: Doctor Who.

I suddenly drew a connection the other day... In the new Doctor Who series, the Doctor's sonic screwdriver glows blue when in use. That isn't, however, the first time a sonic screwdriver which glows has been used - in 1996 Tom Baker came to New Zealand and recorded some adverts here (The results of which can be downloaded from my Doctor Who page). The longer of the five adverts featured the use of the sonic screwdriver, which as you can see below (just) emitted a beam of green light...

Tom Baker's sonic screwdriver

I win a prize for Ultimate Geekery!

Posted at 11:22 PM | Comments (1)

November 7, 2005

When is a blog entry not a blog entry?

Filed in: Internet.

When it's a usenet post.

I have a search feed set up on BlogLines because I like to keep track of what people are saying about a certain celebrity I like. Mostly this works, except for a while last month when a Smallville news site added her name to an item in their news feed, which was updated daily with the content of the entire news page (therefore giving me the same info over and over for a couple of weeks). Some people really need to read up on how rss is supposed to work, but I digress.

On Usenet, which is also accessable via Google Groups, there's a certain newsgroup which shall go unnamed (though no doubt some of the people reading this will know which one) which I unsubscribed from a while back for two reasons: 1) it was largely full of trolls, and 2) a moderated, more-friendly alternative newsgroup was set up to cover the same basic subject.

This is where BlogLines comes in. Apparently BlogLines also carries feeds of Usenet groups, including the one I mentioned above. This means I also get subjected to the aforementioned trolls whenever one of them mentions the search terms for my search feed. Unfortunately there isn't any way around this, as BlogLines have no way to exclude certain feeds from being included in the search results (I suggested this could be handy a while back, when I was having the problem with the Smallville site).

This is more my problem than anything, but this is my weblog, so I thought I'd whine about it here a bit. :)

Posted at 5:33 PM | Comments (1)

November 5, 2005

Sony Copy Protection installs spyware

Filed in: Music.

Normally I don't like promoting breaking the law, but if you want to hear a CD controlled by Sony's copy protection it's safer to download it from the Internet.

Via Antiwesley:

Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

Using a Sony copy protected audio CD may install hidden software without your knowledge. Attempting to remove the software (which is extremely difficult) may result in the non-functioning of devices on your system. The installed software could easy be used by viruses and other attackers to hide files from antivirus software, allowing them to go undetected.

This is additionally surprising to me, as in October last year, Sony announced they were abandoning copy protection on their releases. I guess they changed their minds, huh?

On Amazon, the reviews for Van Zant's album are currently expressing their disgust. Sony have already released a patch to "unhide" the installed malware. But this doesn't change the fact that it's installed without the user's knowledge, and obviously if the user doesn't know it's there, they don't know they need a software pach. And I see nothing about them providing software to actually remove it.

See also: BBC News: Sony slated over anti-piracy CD, TechWeb: Security-spooked Users Slap Sony CD On Amazon.

Posted at 10:02 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

November 3, 2005

Google is down?!

Filed in: Internet.

The end is nigh! Mass hysteria! Cats and dogs living together!

*goes to start on the cannibalism*

Seriously, WTF?

Posted at 9:43 PM | Comments (6)

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